


the day the sky fell in

by TobermorianSass



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Character Death, Gen, Murder, Revenge, Spies & Secret Agents, Tarot, anti-Semitism, gratuitous liberties with timelines & ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 03:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13115073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: In 1984, Wanda and Pietro became wards of the state. In 1998, they finally get their revenge.





	the day the sky fell in

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [MaximoffFicExchange2017](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/MaximoffFicExchange2017) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Look. I find standard coffeeshop AUs boring. So... how about a coffeeshop AU featuring tarot, murder, and Ultron the serial killer? If this features other members of the team, for good or for ill, that would be great, maybe the twins know the detectives on the case, maybe they're working to investigate it themselves, maybe they're unwitting accomplices. Any or all of the above would be gr9.
> 
> This was a great prompt and I had a ton of fun working on it. Big thank yous to Niamh for helping me plot this out, to renaissance for last minute plot unfucking and tarot help and a_song_of_staying for details like weather and road names, which I would never have been able to figure out on my own. 
> 
> Snowsmoke is an OC belonging to essayofthoughts, you can read more about him in her [Memento Mori](https://archiveofourown.org/series/299070) series.
> 
> There is a fair amount of dealing with anti-semitism as a residual social attitude in this story, nothing very graphic but its there.
> 
> This fic is also best coupled with Miles Davis' _L'ascenseur pour l'echaufaud_ & the Dunkirk soundtrack, bc that was what was mainlined during the writing.

_Dear Mr Stark,_

_You are invited to a murder at the_ Cafe Sparrowhawk _, on the corner of First Street and Danube Street, Novi Grad at 6:30 PM precisely on February 15th, 1998._

_Your presence is much awaited._

_Signed,_

_Pietro & Wanda Maximoff _

_And, your loving creation, Ultron._

* * *

 

**i. the fool**

On the morning of the day the sky first fell in, Wanda Maximoff was only ten and poking unhungrily at the chia seed porridge before her. Years later, she would develop a violent dislike for chia seed porridge along with analogue clocks, tiny cramped spaces and a single name: Stark.

The next time, Wanda was prepared.

They had been talking about it for days. How could they not? Everywhere, people out on the streets, the sound of violence weighing heavily on them: too loud, too silent, never right, never correct, always broken when she walked past. Hey witch. Hey Jew. Or worse, shattered in the silent double-takes and glares they flung at her while she sat at her usual wicker table, on the corner where Danube Street and First Street met, silently smoking her cigarette and stirring her cup of coffee. No sugar. No cream. She was not a witch, she was cleverer than that.

Once, she used to sit, turned towards the east. These days it was harder to tell which way the wind would blow.

On the morning the sky fell in, she dressed as usual, walked for block after wretched brutal block until she arrived at the cafe. No one, you see, expects the sky to fall in, even if it is written in the stars. Pietro had already set out the chairs, around their little wicker tables with the tops polished until they shone and greasy fingerprints everywhere else. A single woman sat beside the long glass windows, hidden behind her newspaper except for her fingernails which were a bright red. Two men were deep in conversation over _krafne_ and coffee. They had leather briefcases. Real, she thought. Real, tanned leather. The flowers on the fifth table were drooping.

“It’s no good,” Pietro whispered to her, as she slid change across the counter towards him. “It’s too quiet.”

She fingered the fraying edges of the cards in her sweater’s pocket.

The sky fell in soon after.

On the intersection of Danube Street and First Street, on the corner where Wanda sat drinking her espresso, one of the men stumbled out of the cafe. He was pale and sweating although it was autumn and the air was crisp and cold. She watched as he pulled a tattered handkerchief from one of his pockets and mopped his brow. Then, all of a sudden his briefcase slipped from his hand, splitting open as he doubled over and fell to the ground holding his chest. Loose sheaves of paper with words blacked out with tape and brown paper files that had no numbers and no writing on them spilled out of it. He was dead, by the time Wanda undid his tie and remembered that in a heart attack, the prescribed method of first aid was to strike the victim three times on their chest. By then, the second man had disappeared and Wanda could not remember his face. Neither could Pietro, when she asked him later. Neither of them could remember the details: his height, whether he stirred his coffee with his right or left hand, whether he was blond or dark haired or a mousy brown, whether he had a deep voice, whether he had an accent. All that remained of the second man was a blur. Indistinct features that someone had kindly taken an eraser to and blurred into oblivion. He left behind a half-drunk cup of coffee and his fellow diner’s cup, stained with cyanide.

No one came to take the body away, or ask them questions, because they were all far away from home, in another world. So Wanda took the briefcase home and Pietro took the body to the morgue and the woman with the bright red fingernails watched them both.

It was the third death and Wanda was starting to get worried.

\--

Wanda laid the cards out on the table, lips moving in a silent litany to herself as she arranged them face up between them. The dull pink neon lighting cast the sharp contours of her cheekbones into stark relief: dark shadows pooling in the hollows of her cheeks and in the bags of her eyes. The poor lighting hid the tiny frown he knew was etched into her forehead as she concentrated on the cards in front of them. It was like a bad dream. Like she was only a spectral image, conjured from the recesses of a badly lit music video, except the glitch never came and the image never distorted. It made her look otherworldly. If this was their private hell, then she belonged to the world on the other side of the red door, where things had material forms and the buildings were harsh grey concrete. On the other side, she belonged right here, where her elfin pointed face and the witchiness were part of the window dressing along with the neon and the smoke and the overpowering sound of guitars and bass throbbing overhead and the people dancing dead-faced on the dancefloor.

He didn’t care much for it. But he’d follow her to the bowels of the earth and back if that was what she had to do.

“There,” she said, leaning back. “Will you believe me now?”

She usually laid them out in an ellipse. This was a pyramid. The major arcana, spread neatly out before him with the numbers all wrong. At the top, the emperor. The bottom row, the Hermit, Temperance, the Star, Fortitude and the Fool. The Fool’s face was scratched out now, along with Temperance and the Three of Swords.

“Someone’s watching,” he said. “You know I believe you.”

“Someone’s coming to kill us,” she snapped.

“She has red nails,” he replied. “Like the woman in the cafe.”

“What colour’s her hair?”

“Brown,” he told her. “It’s a wig.”

“Where is she sitting?”

A wordless conversation in sign language: _can she tell? No. Shall I? No, no don’t._

“Two tables behind us.”

Wanda closed her eyes. He thought he saw flickers of red twisting through her hair, a sudden reddish uncertainty that swirled around her features and blurred them for an infinitesimal moment.  A single red thread slithered along the ground like a snake and curled around the woman’s ankle. Pietro forced himself to look down at the cards.

Eyes still shut, Wanda collected them to her, shuffled her deck and began to lay them out again.

“What do you see?”

Wanda shook her head. She was laying the cards out in a circle, with their heads pointed towards them. Eight on the inside, twelve on the outside. One in the centre.

“I don’t know.”

“Shall I -”

“No,” said Wanda, opening her eyes. “She’s -”

She’s one of us.

Wanda’s eyes met and held his, the shadows along her face distorting. Somewhere inside, he knew, threads of red would be spinning slowly through his mind.

“What does it look like?” he asked her once, when they were lying on their hard iron-frame beds and staring up at the dark ceiling of their tiny bedroom because that was the safest place in all of Sokovia.

She turned on her side and smiled at him. “Like an island. A beach with white sands and trees.”

They fell asleep, fingers entwined across the gap between their beds. Wanda first, Pietro after. He stayed awake, thinking. There was no island with white sands or green leafed trees waving gently in the winds.

But which one?

I don’t know.

“Veils,” Wanda said out loud. “All veils.”

“We should go,” he replied.

Not now. Not till we’ve finished.

He bit his tongue. Wanda played the game. He followed. This was how they’d always been, even as children - even more after mama and papa went. Wanda led, he followed. Even now, when every muscle in his body was tensed for flight and his nerves were on fire. It was a bad idea. It always had been a bad idea, but that was only the way it was everywhere they went.

Wanda laid a hand on his knee. He hadn’t even noticed he’d been bouncing his leg.

 _Not now_. Not yet.

The worst part was the waiting. Wanda was good at it. She had her cards, the one’s mama had left behind. Hand-painted, in strong, stark lines and smooth colours that somehow bent the light. Some of them people. Some of them abstract geometrical figures that meant something only to Wanda.

The blonde at the bar, the one Pietro had been watching out of the corner of his eye for the past half hour finally lit her cigarette. He stood up.

“The usual?” he asked Wanda.

“Always,” she said. “Be safe.”

\--

The American came to the cafe the next day.

Wanda was sitting outside as usual, pretending to read a thoroughly worn translation of Pushkin’s tales when he arrived. Like all the Americans of his kind, his suit was poorly cut and he had the kind of pleasant open face they all had. Friendly, but unmemorable and kind of stupid-looking. He was wearing black patent leather shoes.

His drawl reached all the way outside.

“I’ve heard a lot about this place,” she heard him tell Pietro. “I want one of your specials.”

There was a riot happening downtown, but all Wanda felt was the thundering sound of her own blood pumping through her veins.

 _With cream or without cream_. Cream for the west. Without cream for the east.

“Cream?” she heard him say. “No thank you. I’ve got my own stuff.”

A shiver ran down her spine.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

Wanda turned a page. The words swam down the page, letters slithering and sliding away from her reach and rearranging themselves into a simplistic litany. No thank you. My own stuff. My own. Own. Wanda forced herself to uncurl her left hand. Her fingers had curled in on hearing those words, nails digging into the palm. She studied the half-moon crescents for a moment and then went back to pretending to read.

In their profession you lived with the knowledge they’d come after you one day or the other hanging like an axe over your head and you made your peace with it.

“Nice place you have here,” The American drawled.

Seven years ago, the cafe was all ruins. In the eight intervening years between mama and papa’s deaths and Pietro and she fighting their way home, it had been turned into a haven for the lost youth of Novi Grad. Like the two of them, discarded by the brutalist wayside as the Sokovian nation heaved and turned and attempted to birth itself into existence as the USSR and the Yugoslav fell apart. She’d almost been tempted to forgive them the smashed crockery and the splintered wood of the counter. Then the tallest of them, a boy, had leered down at her and said _hey witch_ and Wanda had smiled and let the thousand legged monster inside her unfurl itself and rise. A week later the cafe was back up and running.

They let the junkies stay.

Now though. Things were changing. And so would they. They had a blockade, three blocks away at the embassy, where the Americans lived in their little cocoons. Fancy dinner parties, lunches at the Metropole and cocktail parties at the Old Palace. Were they afraid of the whispers? Or did they turn out at nights in slinky backless dresses and tuxedos on their balconies, tucked safely away from the crowd, to watch Sokovia at war with itself? Sokovia was divided, but sometimes she wondered if the lines really ran between them as they said it did on the radio. The strangers drank cocktails on terraces at night and the rest of them waited with a sense of inevitable doom. There was a line there, somewhere. Somewhere, maybe, in the passports they carried, or along the real oak and solid glass revolving doors to their hotels.

“I’ve got a client. He has a package for you.”

Someone paid for it. Wanda and Pietro had perfected the art of keeping their heads down. Sometimes, you just had to get by, no questions asked.

“I wouldn’t be so hasty, kid.”

Wanda tugged gently on the spools of red that twisted between Pietro and her, a lifeline to keep them from drifting.

 _Play his game_.

Don’t lose it now. Not now. I know, I know. How I know. Patience, dear heart.

“He says its personal.” A pause. “Of personal relevance to you. Pietro Maximoff.”

Wanda froze. Even from here she could sense Pietro’s agitation, his silver spinning and twisting wildly with her red. Did you see. Did you see.

 _Ask him_. Draw him out.

“The package’s down by the old church,” he said. “He said you know the one.”

A hair-thin crack spread like lightning along the side of her cup before she could draw the red back into her.

“Oh, I think you’ll come. You’ll want to see this.”

\--

“Will we go?” he asked Wanda.

She looked up in the middle of wrapping strips of cloth around her knuckles. Always better to be prepared.

“You know the answer.”

“We always do.”

“Always,” she said, turning her back on him. “You know why.”

He fixed the silencer to his revolver, watching the way her dark eyes glinted at it. She said nothing. He did, but it didn’t mean he had to like it.

“I do.”

Something flickered in the depths of her eyes as he slipped the revolver into the waistband of his jeans and pulled his t-shirt down, concealing it.

“Then don’t ask,” she said.

* * *

**ii. the tower**

Wanda fidgeted restlessly with the thin slip of paper as the bus trundled through eerily deserted streets. Strange, how life continued but in silence even after the sky fell in. The wheels of society continued turning, but stealthily as though life itself was now some strange and unspeakable crime, as though she’d warped their world a little by declaring the sky’d fallen in. Even the rain fell silently, a wispy drizzle that ran its damp fingers along the pavements, the roads, the decade old cars parked along the side and along the windows of the bus. A single drop of rain began its journey upwards along her window pane. The bus was almost empty apart from a man in a black coat and hat with a briefcase at his side, a woman wrapped in an oversized coat and two youths who kept glancing in Wanda’s direction. Wanda was only peripherally aware of them. All her attention was centred on the note in her hand.

She’d found it waiting for her, neatly taped to the underside of the fifth park bench as promised. Inside, a string of numbers which told her she was being pulled in immediately, please report to Permissions at 10 AM precisely. Whoever had typed the note had not felt it necessary to add the or else to it. They did not need to.  A meeting at the Secretariat instead of another dead drop or another bank meeting to settle “taxes” was threat enough. Or warning, depending on how you looked at it, in case Wanda and Pietro ever forgot they were only private citizens now because someone, somewhere in the Secretariat had decreed it.

Of course they were being watched. It was the warning that mattered. No private business. No secrets, except on the state’s order.

The bus was slowing to a stop. The Secretariat building was further on but because this was a dilapidated building, widely assumed to be the home of pencil and paper-pushers, it was necessary to walk this distance, past blocks of drab and characterless buildings that had erupted during the seventies.

Wanda, however, preferred the shortcut.

She stepped off the bus and without pausing to look behind, ducked down a narrow one-way cobbled street. Some people liked the long way, down broad streets where a stalker could be lost in the crowd. Wanda liked the winding streets of Novi Grad, where she could lose a stalker in three or four turns but not because it was the right, or the best way to travel but because it was charming and because sometimes, the bland half-brutalist half-featureless buildings that lined the streets of new Novi Grad were a terrifying weight that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

“You’re in trouble,” a voice murmured in her ear, accompanied by the familiar smell of cigarette smoke and the sharp cold of winter.

“Snowsmoke,” she murmured, hand already instinctively reaching for the packet of cigarettes she kept in her jacket for him. “How bad is it?”

Andrej took the cigarettes from her - three into the pocket of his jacket, one into his mouth that Wanda lit with her lighter, another concession to Snowsmoke that she and Pietro took turns at carrying around on the odd chance they’d run into Andrej on the streets of Novi Grad.

“Bad,” he said. “What’d you do it for, witch-girl? You know how they like us.”

“On a string,” she said. “I know.”

“Who’s the girl?”

She shrugged and tucked her hands into her pockets. “She just came, one day. She’s not -”

“No,” he replied. “She’s not American.”

“She didn’t follow us.”

“Yes,” he said. “But Zemo knows you went to the church to meet someone. Your friend was loud. Too loud.”

Wanda drew The American’s face up from memory. Bland, uninteresting, maybe a little too aggressive. Maybe she should have asked Pietro about his hands: were they too big? too callused? too muscled and brawny? Her own hands were slim, worn only from washing vessels - like Pietro, who was wiry and strong, but looked exactly what he was, which was a server at a cafe. Snowsmoke’s fingertips were stained with tobacco, from where he rolled cigarettes for himself, but it fit him too: witch-boy, street waif. Ordinary people, living ordinary lives in a half-extraordinary country.

“I don’t think he’s done it before,” she told Snowsmoke.

“Are you going to -”

“If Zemo asks the correct question,” she said. “But he won’t.”

“But he may,” said Snowsmoke. “He didn’t get up _there_ by being stupid.”

They stopped by the steps of the Secretariat building. In the drizzle, it looked glummer and more depressing than usual.

“Be careful,” Snowsmoke said. For a moment he was completely serious and Wanda felt the first prickles of  doubt. Perhaps, as Snowsmoke said, Zemo was not all as stupid as he looked and maybe, Zemo had known all along about all three of them and their silent, implicit vow.

Then Snowsmoke grinned, lopsided and devilish. “Witch-girl.”

Wanda smiled. “You too, witch-boy.”

Inside was respectfully hushed, only the faintest whisper of papers, shoes and voices echoing across the lobby as Wanda strolled through. She should have, maybe, shown more respect: perhaps, looked around anxiously, or for a moment at least deigned to look sorry. A mousy-haired man with an air of self-importance led her across a courtyard inside, across four different buildings to an inconspicuous modern brutalist building that held the agency’s offices. He held himself stiffly, like she was small and she was dirt. Wanda rolled her eyes at his stiff back as he led her down a fluorescent lit corridor, still caught in time in the dull and sterile greys and browns of the seventies. He could judge all he liked. Everyone in Novi Grad made a point of it anyway.

Zemo was writing at his desk when she entered his office: small and neat and impossible to read upside down.

“Please sit,” he said, without looking at her. Another lesson, another trivial excursion into the realm of bureaucracy and order. Stay in your place, don’t get ahead of yourself. Little girls and boys picked by the hand of the state and forgiven for the crimes of their parents shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds them.

Wanda watched the hands of the clock - bland, cheap black and white plastic with no numbers, just marks. Three minutes passed before Zemo finished his lesson in humility, put his papers away and folded his hands on the table.

“The American,” he said. “He had a package.”

“Yes.”

“What was it.”

An imperative, not a question.

“Information,” she said. “Not a package.”

“What kind of information?”

“Not the useful kind,” she said.

Zemo drummed the table with his fingers. “Do you want to visit the Doctor?”

“No.”

“Then you should answer me when I ask you,” he said. “I don’t like pulling teeth, unlike the Doctor. Now, please - tell me. What kind of information?”

“About a cold case,” she replied. “I didn’t think it mattered.”

“I’ll judge that. When?”

Under the table, where he couldn’t see, she dug her fingernails into her arm to keep herself from lunging at him.

“1981,” she lied. Out of sight, her fingers traced the numbers into her arm. 1984.

1984, or, the year mama and papa disappeared and Pietro and she became wards of the Yugoslavian state.

Zemo frowned. “1981?”

“Yes,” she said. “He claims to have information on it.”

“1981.” He waited. “Don’t make me send you to the Doctor.”

“Petrovic,” she replied, reluctantly. She remembered, vaguely, rumours she’d overheard once at some sad Christmas party. Petrovic, whose body was found frozen at the bottom of the castle on the outskirts of Novi Grad. “He thinks he knows who did it.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think he knows nothing,” she replied. “But maybe we can use him.”

“No,” said Zemo, curtly. “We have better sources. Tell me about the woman instead. Has she talked to anyone?”

“No.” Wanda paused, then offered of her own accord: “She orders an espresso every day. No milk, no sugar.”

Then, a few seconds later. “Pietro thinks she’s wearing a wig.”

“She’s FSB,” he said. “Don’t waste my time. Of course she’s wearing a wig.”

“How do you say that?” she asked him.

He looked unimpressed.

“Make contact with her,” he replied. “Clean the tables and talk to her. Find out what she wants.”

“Maybe she just wants an espresso,” said Wanda. She shouldn’t have. The man outside the door would have been angry at her. Zemo simply assessed - a cold, impersonal stare that scrutinized her like a scientist’s rat.

“If you insist,” he said, cordially. “But I know she’s FSB, so, now - please, Miss Maximoff, no more trouble from you. Make contact with her and report back, even what you think are irrelevant trivialities such as her orders. You know the cardinal rule, don’t you?”

No coincidences. Wanda’s nails dug savagely into her arm again. She’d always wondered why Pietro and why her. As it turned out, it wasn’t a coincidence - and neither was Zemo.

“Yes,” she said. “All facts are always relevant, even the coincidences.”

“Correct,” he said. He even seemed earnest about it, even as he reached for his papers in dismissal. “Your work is as always, appreciated, Miss Maximoff.”

Wanda stood to go.

“Thank you,” she said. Then, with added reluctance: “Sir.”

“Oh,” said Zemo, before she could leave. “And please, Miss Maximoff. No secrets. The department doesn’t look kindly on its employees keeping secrets from them.”

\--

“Do you believe in justice?” he asked the two of them.

Wanda laughed. Justice was such a very American idea. A wrong, righted. As though one right could undo an infinite number of wrongs. As though wrongs could be righted - as if people _bothered_ with that little triviality outside of the little bubble they live in at the embassies.

“Sure,” said Pietro. “Depends on what you’re offering.”

\--

1984\. Or, the winter of shit-stirring and Sokovian nationalism. Keep a dragon trussed up for twenty years and that’s what you get. On the one hand, they want democracy. On the other, the dull grey exposed concrete walls suddenly tattooed with swastikas and messages telling her and Pietro and mama and papa to die. Somewhere down the line, the revolution for freedom is being led by what they call “ultra-nationalists” which is a kind way of saying “fascist” and no longer by the socialists or communists or the partisans who first liberated them. Or perhaps, not saying it. There is, in Sokovia, a lot of not saying _it_. Such as, no one is an anti-Semite, they just happen to know that all Jews are unequivocally evil, even the children. Maybe, especially the children.

A man opens the door to the tiny cupboard Wanda and Pietro are hiding in at 3:05 PM on the fifteenth of February, 1984 precisely. They scream. He smiles, he thinks it’s reassuring. He holds his hand out to them. Neither of them can say no.

A lady takes them away. She is not strict, she is not mean, she is not friendly. She is nothing. She says very little to the two of them and when she does, Wanda senses not hatred but confusion. What should she do with children? How to comfort a child? At what level of sophistication does a ten year old operate? Even then, Wanda knows this lady has never been with a child before and that something is wrong, wrong, wrong.

The last thing she remembers from home is this: a file, open on the bed and at the top, the word STARK INDUSTRIES printed in bold and large letters, in case you, a stranger, should imagine this belonged to anyone else in the world.

\--

“No,” he said triumphantly. “They haven’t shown you the bigger picture. I can.”

\--

Wanda waited at the bus stop, rain soaking her hair and her clothes as she forced herself to breath evenly, despite the growing ball of panic and rage in the pit of her stomach.

Zemo was a small, faceless man. One among many working in a nameless, faceless organization spawned out of the sudden desire to prove the case for Sokovian independence. Everything was purely professional, down to the way he shook her hand when Strucker brought her to meet him, fresh from the castle. One single firm tug downwards and just like that, he was their handler. And he was telling them the story of their lives and opening windows into the hidden world her parents had occupied: papa as an aerospace engineer and later programmer, mama running her cafe which was a front, a home for spies of every stripe and star.

Zemo was also a liar.

Wanda exhaled shakily. She forced the words out, away from the shadowed corners of her mind to its centre. Zemo was a liar. Of course he had always been, but this was worse.

“Zemo is a liar,” she whispered and unclenched her fists.

\--

“Let me put it this way,” said the speaker. “I’m offering you revenge.”

“Who are you?” she said. Almost instinctively, she felt Pietro hover closer; the tenseness in his sinews which she could feel in the few inches between her shoulder and his chest.

“A well-wisher.”

“That’s not a name.”

“I didn’t know you believed in them.”

“So let me rephrase,” Wanda said. “We don’t trust faceless well-wishers.”

“Smart girl,” he said. “But I can’t show you until I’m free.”

\--

“Do you believe him?” Pietro asked her later, when they were at home.

Wanda felt the mattress next to her dip and then Pietro’s familiar presence on her left. She looked at the file in her hands, with its uneven paper-clipped together edges and the haphazard collection of photos in grey, all slowly yellowing. Fifteen years, maybe more, have passed between these photographs and the present. They were worn: round-edged, dark-edged, torn. Someone had been looking at them between then and now, but nobody had bothered with _them_.

She closed the file and put it in his hands.

“Revenge, I mean,” he said, by way of clarification.

“I couldn’t.” She paused, searching for the words. “He’s a wall to me. I can’t see what he’s thinking - not yet.”

“But what do you think?”

“What else can we do?”

“What good will it do us?”

Wanda watched him flip the file’s pages back and forth.

“Closure,” she said. “Public humiliation.”

“But they live,” he said. “And maybe one day, they’ll go free.”

“So we take what we can,” she said. “And then maybe, we get our own payback.”

Pietro moved restlessly off the bed to the window.

“And then what happens?” he asked her.

“They go to hell,” she said. “And we go free.”

\--

Pietro watched in the dark hollow of the church as the red spiraled lazily around Wanda, throwing long dark shadows that flickered and danced, intertwined in the dull red glow. He wondered how it looked from outside. Whether one of those shaved head assholes who talked tough but hadn’t half a ball between them, would see it and scream about the devil and witches and witches sabbaths. Fuck knows they’d screamed about it back when Wanda was just Wanda and neither of them had powers. Just the wrong kind of names, the wrong kind of address, the wrong kind of _look_ , the wrong kind of _everything_.

Wanda stretched out her arms and Pietro’s hand went to the revolver at the base of his spine. Now the red stretched out too. A million-fingered pair of hands that reached for the dark gaping hole at the entrance to the crypt. Or what used to be the crypt, until someone had stretched fat iron bars in a grid across the entrance. The red tendrils curled around these bars now.

She turned and looked at him. A dull red glow lurked in the back of her eyes. Tiny red tendrils twisted themselves through her hair. Pietro never tired of the miracle: of the precise moment when Wanda was no longer just Wanda but a fey otherworldly creature, when the red poured as naturally out of her as the rage and silent fury and raw power they both held trapped in their frail bodies.

He nodded slightly, index finger sliding into place on the trigger of his revolver, just in case.

The red went taut. There was a deep rumbling noise, then a grating and the whining of metal grinding against stone. Then, the door ripped free from its hinges and went flying backwards.

“Come out,” said Wanda. “You can't hide from us now.”

He stood. Tall. Taller than a man, because he was not. The red reflected off him: bloodied, bright and sharp against the false sinews that twisted round and up his arms. Like a man but not. Like a golem but not. A fucking abomination. Eight feet tall and with a hideous glow in its unnatural cybernetic eyes and a leer as he flexed his fingers.

Jesus Christ, Pietro wanted to say, though the words were fucking foreign to him. What else could you say to eight feet of fucking robot standing in the desolate ruins of a forgotten church? What else but take someone else's god’s name in vain and hope it was enough to preserve you.  Jesus Christ Wanda, let's get out now.

“What are you?” said Wanda.

He eased the revolver out .

The robot looked away from its hands and at her. It was, Pietro realized, smiling: bared teeth and a grimace that looked like the robot was only learning to smile. Or maybe, not smiling at all.

It laughed.

“Take your pick,” it said.

\--

Zemo was found a week later in his office, four blocks from the Secretariat building. He was face down on his desk. His throat was slashed open. The desk had been cleaned. None of the papers from his office were missing.

* * *

 

**iii. the magician**

Wanda watched from across the courtyard as they carried the body away. Snowsmoke was with her, one hand tugging insistently at the sleeve of her jacket.

“We should go,” he said. “You don’t want them to see us here.”

Her fingers grazed against the angled edges of a card in her jacket pocket. She traced the design against its flat edges, following the contours of the abstracted coloured paper images her mother had once cut and stuck together to make her deck. It was the tower.

“I wished he was dead,” she said flatly. “And now he is.”

Last night she drove a single drawing pin into the centre of the card in a fit of sudden rage of remembrance.

“You’re not that kind of witch.”

The tower, split in half. Zemo had led them into a world connected by fine, spider web thin threads and Wanda had mapped each connection with a precise hatred. Why? She couldn’t say. Sometimes she’d dreamed she could take that precise hatred and shape it into a dagger made of red that she could drive into each of their hearts. Sometimes, all she thought of was a tiny photograph that Pietro carried around in his wallet - the last and only personal piece of history they were allowed, because even now, the cafe on the corner was tainted by their long and shadowy hand. She could feel then, the urge for revenge blooming like a sickly rafflesia in the pit of her stomach.

She knew, too, that somewhere deep in Pietro, this same sickly rafflesia bloomed.

“I’m not afraid for me,” she told Snowsmoke. “Do you understand?”

\--

“Mr Maximoff,” says the Doctor.

Pietro closes his hand: it is smaller than he remembers it being. Silently he pictures the little photograph he smuggled in in the sole of his shoes. They’re standing by a sunny moss-covered wall in Dubrovnik, on a rare holiday when papa could spare time (and money). They are all smiling.

“Mr Maximoff,” says the Doctor, patiently. The Doctor is oh so patient and Pietro hates it, loathes it in the deep crevices of his bones. “Pay attention please.”

So Pietro does. So Pietro jumps, so Pietro runs, so Pietro does a million and one silly tasks while the Doctor makes notes, so Pietro goes back into the cage at night when the Doctor is finished with him, so Pietro is observed: a fine scientific specimen, an aberration, a testament to the triumphs of the twenty-first century, a game-changing weapon.

So Pietro closes his hand into a balled up fist and looks the Doctor in the eye and adds him to his grocery list of names.

\--

Now that Zemo was gone, there was no reason for Wanda to make contact with the woman. Yet Wanda found herself unable to stop going through the motions. Research. Observation. Note making. Inferencing.

“Nothing,” said Pietro, at the end of the week. “She doesn’t do anything.”

“Where does she go?”

“Home,” he said. “She doesn’t leave. She comes here, then goes back. Sometimes she goes to Savic’s for her groceries. That’s it.”

By the end of the second week, Pietro had a chart for her he’d drawn up on a piece of paper: leave her house in the morning for a walk to a store on her corner for a packet of cigarettes. Then she smokes three while taking a walk through the park across from that corner. At nine, she returns to her apartment. At half ten precisely, she leaves again and comes straight to the cafe where she spends her entire day - first reads three newspapers from end to end, then removes a book wrapped in brown paper from which she makes notes on loose-leaf paper that she keeps in a plastic sleeve. She only leaves every hour and a half to smoke in one of the chairs kept outside the cafe. At half past seven, she buys herself a sandwich and two _krafne_ (plum jam, always) and leaves. She returns straight home. At nine in the evening she smokes the remaining cigarettes all by herself on a bench in the park. She returns home. At eleven, she turns the lights out.

“Like I said,” said Pietro. “Nothing. Not even the cinema - unless we’re going somewhere, then she follows us.”

“TV?”

“She has a radio,” said Pietro. “She listens to the news and BBC International. Not even Radio Moscow.”

They didn’t have money for bugs, or they would have done it.

At the start of the third week, the woman made contact of her own volition. Wanda had contemplated, once or twice, going up to her and asking her who are you, what do you want and why are you following us we’re only small fry in this game - are you new here, we can show you the real deal. Every time she came close to blurting the question out, her trained instincts hijacked her gut and she shied away.

“You’re watching me,” said the woman, on that Tuesday evening, as Wanda wiped down empty tables with a damp cloth.

Wanda shrugged. “Only returning the favour.”

The woman smiled at this. “I didn’t think you’d noticed. Should have shown me a sign.”

“That would defeat the purpose, no?”

“But it’s friendlier that way.”

“I’m not in this business to make friends.”

“But it makes things easier, doesn’t it?” said the woman. “Pretending. One way or the other.”

“Who are you?” Wanda asked her.

The woman’s smile wavered for a split second. One moment, a strange vulnerability entered her face. The next, it was gone.

“Natalia Alianovna Romanova,” she said, strangely proud of this accomplishment. As though the name meant something somewhere, but as Wanda could have told her Novi Grad was nowhere and in nowhere places, names like that lost their meaning and the only real meaning,  in their trade, was how much you could sell and how well.

“Wanda Maximoff.”

“I know who you are,” Natalia replied, expectant look fading into confusion.

“Congratulations,” said Wanda. She gestured at Natalia’s books. “Look, I need to -”

“You don’t know who I am,” said Natalia, confusion deepening into a frown. “They didn’t - nobody told you.”

\--

“Let me tell you a story,” said the robot, who insisted on calling himself Ultron because that was what he had been named while still only a couple of wires and loose contacts dangling on a string in his creator’s lab.

Pietro rolled his eyes. “I don’t want your stories, I want answers.”

“So impatient.”

“I’ve got stories of my own,” said Pietro. “Here’s one for you. I am an orphan, a ward of the state. I should be protected by the state, but I am also the son of a traitor, so what does it matter? Now you tell me my father’s not a traitor, but it’s too fucking late because they’ve already turned us into this - experiments. It took months for it to stop hurting, to stop the itching and the shaking.”

Like getting off heroin, he didn’t say. He’d seen it happen, though. He’d lost track of how many junkies who’d lived below in their cellar had come and gone - and by gone he meant disappeared, which meant at the bottom of a nameless grave somewhere. They turned pale first and then the shaking started and Pietro knew how it felt, how these million myriad urges would bubble up underneath the skin until it felt as though there were a million different Pietro’s all scratching and fighting to run in a million different directions. It took, no not months, years, to get used to it and bring it back under control. And even now, sometimes, he had to go down to the woods and just run, run, run until a blank sense of calm descended on him.

“You know,” said Ultron. “I could give you the answer right now, but unless you can see the bigger picture here, it won’t make a difference.”

“What’s it going to do?” said Pietro. “Will it change anything? I don’t need to know the bigger picture.”

“Who do you work for, Pietro Maximoff?”

Puzzled by the sudden shift in Ultron’s line, Pietro frowned. “I work for myself.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

Pietro winced at Ultron’s raised voice.

“Okay,” he replied. “I work for the Sokovian government.”

Again, that horrible facsimile of a smile. “You don’t work for the Sokovian government.”

“I’m sorry.” Pietro crossed his arms. “I just told you. I work for the Sokovian government. Officially: the ministry of -”

“The ministry of nothing,” said Ultron. “Did you ever wonder how a tiny little department in an even tinier country on the brink of collapse got the money to make you?”

“Military budgets -”

“Go to tanks,” Ultron replied. “And missiles. And artillery. AK-47s. But a science project - that’s not really the kind of thing failed states get into, unless they’re working for someone.”

“You mean the USSR,” said Pietro. “Why should it surprise me?”

Ultron hummed. “Because, Pietro Maximoff, I’m talking about HYDRA.”

\--

“Will it hurt?” Wanda asks him.

The Doctor, who has a smile that does not reach his eyes and a bedside manner that sends unpleasant shivers down her spine (like winter in February, when the snow has become ice and the ground is frozen and there is a sharp biting wind always in the air), taps the syringe to remove any air bubbles in it.

“Of course it will,” he says. “But you’re a brave girl aren’t you?”

She is. She has seen, after all, from her cupboard in the wall, mama and papa murdered, has heard their screams and papa’s head dissolve into a bloodstain on their kitchen wall. There is nothing she can’t handle.

“The drug will sedate you,” says the Doctor. “It’ll be easier this way.”

The Doctor has always been a liar.

\--

“Please,” said Natalia. “Sit down.”

“I’m sorry,” Wanda replied. “Should I know you?”

Natalia considered this question.

“Have you heard about the Black Widow?”

“Yes,” said Wanda. “But I know you’re not her.”

“No.” Again, that smile - half rueful, half amused. “Is there somewhere we can go to talk?”

\--

The pain tears through Pietro’s body like a forest fire on a summer’s day, wild and out of control. Dimly, he can hear the Doctor lecturing someone. Maybe students. They bring a lot of those to the castle and Pietro wonders where they get them, when Novi Grad’s university is out on the street calling for a free Sokovia. The Doctor says it is lactic acid, collecting on his muscles at an abnormal speed given that he is lying flat on his back and strapped to a bed and not running.

There is an itching sensation in his chest. He wonders if this means there’s a monster being born inside him, that will tear out of him and this is why he is on fire: his muscles are tearing apart at the seams and soon his skin will begin to tear and split.

“Most subjects never make it past this point,” says the Doctor. “The twins, however. Let us say they are unique in this regard.”

Pietro slides out of consciousness. Somewhere, the words slip into his mind.

They are survivors.

\--

Natalia walked in silence alongside Wanda all the way back to the apartment she shared with Pietro, once she’d finished locking up behind her. Pietro was not at home either. A twinge of fear crawled its way up her spine, but she pushed it away.

“Nice chart,” said Natalia, studying the configuration of tarot cards cello taped to the wall. “Which one’s you?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Again, that strange uncertain look on Natalia’s face - there one moment and gone the next.

“I’m not,” said Natalia, slowly as she touched the Priestess’ card. “I’m not in your business anymore.”

“I was told you were FSB.”

“I used to be.” Natalia turned away from the chart. “It’s a long story.”

“Is that why you’ve come here?”

“Yes. And something else.”

The ends of her fringed shawl twisted in her hands. There was every possibility this was a trap. If it was, it made no sense. Pietro and she were only conduits, passing information from one side to the other and carefully falsifying it one way or the other as per the Sokovian government’s request as they did so.

“I’m not defecting,” said Natalia, pre-empting Wanda’s train of thought. There was a dangerous glint in her eye and a stubbornness to the angle of her chin. “I’ve -”

“You’re on the run.”

“Like I said, it’s a long story.” Natalia ran her fingers over the little table Wanda and Pietro used for dinner. “Shall we?”

\--

“HYDRA?”

He’d heard the stories. There were few among them who hadn’t heard it. Like all the stories of their continued survival, this tale too was passed from one generation to the next as both testament and cautionary tale. His papa was a doctor and as his papa was fond of telling him, there was no profession that was inexcusable: none at all which could not be twisted to some vile and hateful end one way or the other. Papa had made sure Wanda and he knew.

Maybe, he sometimes thought fatalistically, papa had seen his fate long before it was coming.

“Now you begin to see,” said Ultron. “Didn’t you ever wonder how a tiny department in a half-failed state found themselves a doctor interested in the supernatural? HYDRA’s mystics disappeared after the war. Back into the woodwork, into the places where secrets thrived - and the rest of the world ate it all up. All that power now at their fingertips: humans everywhere are so predictable.”

“If it happened in secret,” said Pietro, still suspicious, “how do you know about it?”

Ultron’s smile deepened. “I think that’s what you’d call classified information, but go ahead, Maximoff. Why don’t you and your sister ask your doctor who he is and where he’s from - ask him why they chose you two out of all the children they could have chosen -”

Bile rose up Pietro’s throat.

(“Remember, at the end of the day we will always be outsiders to them,” his papa says. “Ten centuries and we’ll always be outsiders to them. It is not your fault, my darlings. Always remember that. It is not your fault.”)

“No,” said Ultron. “You don’t have to ask, because in your heart of hearts, Pietro Maximoff, you already know.”

\--

  1. Or, the critical mission that Natalia Alianovna Romanova failed.



It was a simple mission. A scientist turned programmer on the brink of going rogue. His wife, a spy’s courier, suspected of playing three sides of the secret war, all while building a road for her husband and two children to flee west. The dossier was sparse on information concerning motivation, but with two young children it was not hard to put a story together. Safety. Freedom. Security, somewhere else than Yugoslavia, in the pangs of either death throes or birth pains following Tito’s death. She was to gather as much information as she could, secure any critical information and plant a false trail for the “neighbours” to find. When she was done, she would leave.

She arrived in Novi Grad in November of 1983 to establish a presence and patterns before making her move. What she found when she finally did was, well, nothing. It was true there was a joint project with the Americans and it was true that Dr Maximoff was collaborating on a top secret security project with a private American firm - but there was no evidence to show he’d been passing critical information to anyone, except dutifully, to his superiors. Natalia Alianovna dutifully drafted this up in a report which she submitted to her superior at the consulate in Novi Grad.

Needless to say, her first report was considered a critical failure. She was growing careless. She was growing soft. Had she forgotten how to read the signs of betrayal. Was she going to be taken in by child’s tricks. She would have to be replaced and think of the shame. Such a failure. Surely she would not like to have such a stain on her otherwise pristine record.

The second report got her called a stubborn bitch. This was true enough and Natalia Alianovna accepted this with good grace. She was an instrument of precision, not a bludgeon made to settle petty political vendettas. So far as she could tell, Dr Maximoff’s fault was only being an extraordinarily dutiful and honest man. And Jewish.

Always, that sticking point. Natalia was old enough and cynical enough to have no illusions about the professed ideology of the Soviet state, or for that matter any state with delusions of moral grandeur. Each claimed moral infallibility. Each built their country on the same principle. All men were equal - right until they were secretly liars, spies and traitors in collusion with a mysterious enemy. One inserted one’s enemy of choice here, but the accused remained almost always the same wherever one went in the world. She had been, variously, to Berlin, Paris, London, Belgrade, Minsk and of course good old Moscow. Traitors remained the same which is to say they were minorities whose only loyalties, as one knew, were to others of their kind wherever they were. Ergo, the conspiracy, ergo the accusations against Dr Maximilian Maximoff who had the misfortune of being decidedly Jewish and a dutiful and honest man and thus, doubly hated by a thoroughly rotten system

The third report disappeared in a fire where the tramps warmed their hands on the outskirts of Novi Grad and a fourth one, short, vague and inconclusive was drafted in its place. It said nothing one way or the other, its conclusions were sufficiently vague that the cultural attaché in Belgrade could in turn quote it in his own report to Moscow. The hints, the innuendo were all that was needed. Natalia turned her attention to the more practical demands of her assignment. A false trail was laid. A whisper here and a hint there and Natalia Alianovna had sown the first seeds of distrust and malcontent among the neighbours.

She followed her instructions to the letter, but not the spirit. In spirit, Natalia Alianovna had begun her first betrayal. This was not novel. A spy’s first betrayal was a rite of passage and nothing more. She could have chosen her breadcrumbs with greater care, but instead she flung them around carelessly. Dr Maximoff’s research was uninteresting and insignificant. Wasn’t it strange that Dr Maximoff should be trusted when his wife was busy trading secrets to the highest bidder. Wasn’t it strange that Dr Maximoff’s reputation was so unimpeachable. Poorly crafted lies that should have unravelled at the slightest touch.

In late January, Natalia Alianovna waits for her orders to come through: take the Maximoffs and return to Moscow. As she waits, the hooks she has been casting around so carelessly begin to sink in. The neighbours are on red alert. All the while, Natalia Alianovna waits for a signal from Moscow - come back home, get out. Even a punishment. Instead, silence. Those fifteen days will be the longest days of her life, longer even than 1991 which feels like an eternity. She marks Dr Maximoff’s fall from grace into suspicion in real time. By February, a termination - such a sanitary and bureaucratic word for assassination - order has been put out for Dr Maximoff and Natalia can only watch across the gap between their apartment buildings as Dr Maximoff walks straight into the trap laid out before him.

\--

For Wanda, the pain is no forest fire. It is a splitting of the skull, a dissection of the body and the exposure of its softest and tenderest parts to the entire universe, to all of time and space in its chaotic and frenetic fullness. It is a complete and total opening up of the mind to a sublime vastness that is everywhere and nowhere and all things and nothing all at once. It is unimaginable agony. The human body is made to contain one person, one mind and set of flesh and bones, it is not made to contain the rivers that criss-cross the universe, to feel every single atom and neutrino streaming through her body.

“-- special qualities,” says the Doctor, his voice splintering into a million shards that come from every direction. “In the genes - inherited -”

 _Witch girl_ . Snowsmoke’s voice echoes in her ears. _Witch_.

\--

“They were,” Wanda whispered, too afraid to finish the sentence.

“Yes,” Pietro whispered back, fingers combing gently through Wanda's hair, as they say together on his bed, too afraid to sit away from each other and let the full weight of the truth settle between them.

“They took us because they knew mama was half-Jewish, half-witch,” Wanda continued. “Because she was half-Romani.”

“Because we would have better chances of surviving.” Pietro's voice was bitter. “Like we have.”

Wanda's mouth was filled with the sour-bitter taste of bile.

“I hate them,” Pietro continued. “All of them. Even Zemo. He knew, you know? He was papa's handler. The ambulance, the papers, the investigation -”

“To make sure they'd never -”

“He deserved it,” said Pietro. “They all deserve it.”

“Yes,” said Wanda. “They did. They do.”

Pietro was silent, but Wanda didn’t need the bonds of red and silver-blue that threaded the two of them together to know that Pietro was not here with her in the room, but miles away in a dungeon in a castle, in a glass cage.

Or worse, on the other side of the city in an office on the third floor of a nondescript grey building where Helmut Zemo sat writing at his desk, late into the night as he always did.

On his own, Pietro would not - and could not - they shared everything - but with Ultron and with fifteen years of anger and his foolish desire to shield her from the worst of the world, it just might be. Like her, he might have been summoned. And just like she had thought how easy it would be to let the red take over and let its threads wrap themselves around Zemo’s neck, he might have felt it too as he sat there where she sat.

“I’d kill them all,” Pietro whispered.

“I know,” said Wanda. “So would I.”

\--

“Why come now?” Wanda asked her. “Why tell me this now?”

Natalia Alianovna was silent before she answered, slowly testing each word.

“Because,” she said, “I don’t think it’s the full story.”

The ticking of the clock on the wall was overwhelming in the sudden silence that followed this declaration. Somewhere, in one of the neighbouring apartments, someone was listening to the rock channel playing hits from yesteryear: thrashing drums and frenetic guitars blurred, distorted and dimmed through the concrete walls. It must have been the long-haired man squatting in the apartment opposite the hallway, who Pietro suspected was either a junkie or a neo-Nazi and possibly both.

“May I?” she continued, pointing to the spread on the wall.

Before Wanda could answer, she’d begun removing the cards from the wall.

“I don’t see how this helps,” said Wanda.

Natalia Alianovna smiled as she held the deck out for Wanda to cut and then select the cards.

“The easiest way to tell this story is not to tell it,” she said, laying them out. “See?”

Wanda frowned at the cards.

“The High Priestess - that’s you,” said Natalia Alianovna. “Justice - that’s me, the spy without a spymaster -”

“Natalia Alianovna, the spy turned honest man,” Wanda said drily.

“Please,” she replied, “call me Natasha. And the Hanged Man.”

“Stark?”

Natalia - Natasha - looked up sharply from her cards and studied Wanda intently.

“No,” she said. “You haven’t met him.”

“Is this the story you don’t know?”

“I know it now.” Natalia - Natasha - rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t explain everything, but he knows more than I do.”

“But why tell me?”

Natalia - Natasha - tapped the Justice card. “We’re both on the brink of making an important decision.”

“I thought you’ve made yours.”

“You know what it’s like,” Natalia - Natasha - said pensively. “You make a life-changing decision and it turns out you keep having to make them.”

“No I don’t,” said Wanda. “I had mine made for me.”

 _By people like you_ , she nearly said out loud.

“No?” said Natasha softly, mouth twisted bitterly. “How old were you?”

“Ten -”

“Four,” said Natasha. “Now ask me how old I am.”

“How old are you?”

“I am fifty years old, little girl,” said Natasha, who looked no older than Wanda did. “Do you understand now?”

“You’re the Black Widow.”

“Was,” said Natasha. “Like you said. I’m not her anymore. So you see, decisions, choices, we’re not so very different. I made one choice, but now - too much freedom is as terrifying as too little. I can’t undo the past, I am no longer the weapon made to shape the future, so what am I?”

The ferocious yearning of her gaze disconcerted Wanda.

“I don’t know,” she replied, finally. “I can’t help you.”

\--

Pietro traced the outlines of the seven of cups as Wanda continued shuffling and reshuffling the cards.

“She’s lying,” she said. “I know she is and I hate her.”

“But what if - this person she said - knows.”

“Here,” said Wanda, “you’re holding that wrong.”

She laid it on the counter in front of him, right way up for her and reversed for him.

“You’ll be tempted,” said Wanda. “But danger lies in each of these and you have to be careful how you choose, because some of them are not what they seem.”

Pietro rolled his eyes. “You’re always telling me to be careful.”

“I mean it more now,” Wanda said. “I don’t trust her.”

“You remember what we promised.”

Wanda sighed. “If it goes wrong, it’s your fault.”

“I always take the blame,” he teased. Then more seriously: “we’re so close.”

“I know, my love, I know,” she said. “And that is when we must keep our eyes open most.”

* * *

**iv. the hanged man**

The Doctor’s death was far more gruesome. Zemo’s was economical and clean, one neat death blow. But the Doctor was found hanging from a nameless tree in the forest, his face an ugly mottled blue-grey and when the coroner’s doctor was done with the examination he was forced to conclude it was the water in the Doctor’s lungs that had killed him and not the hanging.

\--

The Hanged Man, who Natasha brought to the cafe late one evening, smuggling him through the tradesman’s entrance on Pietro’s insistence, looked nothing more than a nameless tramp. He had no name and he had no history, no story of his own to tell except that he existed in the here and now and like Wanda and Pietro and Natasha, was a servant of the state. He said little on his own and sat like a bedraggled crow left out in the rain, hunched over himself as though making himself smaller would make him invisible.

“Just call him soldier,” Natasha told Wanda, while the Hanged Man studied the menu on the wall and with Pietro’s help, found something to eat. “He gets angry if you ask him his name.”

And though he had no country and no history, he had a genuine American accent unlike Natasha, who rolled her r’s a little too hard and which Wanda noticed only because of the Americans from the embassy who drifted in and out of the cafe all day long.

“Tell them what you remember,” Natasha said, encouragingly. “They’re friends.”

Under the table, Pietro’s hand reached for hers. His palm was cold and clammy. They’d heard two different versions of the story in the past two days and now there was a third waiting to be told, waiting to upend everything they’d told themselves.

The Hanged Man cleared his throat and began his story.

\--

“So this list,” said Pietro, hunched up over the table.

“Look for yourself.” Wanda slid it across to him.

Outside, the first flakes of snow for the night were starting to drift lazily downwards. In an hour, the snow would be coming down thick and fast. The thought of walking home in the middle of a snowstorm did not bother Pietro. Between Wanda’s red magic and his speed, a snowstorm was a mere triviality.

“Okay,” he said, scanning the list. “I see the names.”

“And the pattern?”

He pushed the list back to her. “So someone’s going after the spies. Surprise.”

“What other explanation do you have?”

Pietro shrugged. “I don’t. I just want to know where List and the American fit in -”

“And that’s the other thing,” Wanda interrupted. “Who’s the American? No one seems to know him, not even in the embassy.”

“A private shit-stirrer,” Pietro hazarded.

Wanda scowled.

“Okay,” Pietro conceded. “I agree, okay? I said I believed you.”

“They’re closing in,” said Wanda. “And after Strucker -”

He waited for her to complete her sentence, but she was now studying him intently instead.

“Did you,” she said hesitantly. “Zemo -”

“Fuck. Is that what you think?”

“I’m worried. You spent a lot of time with Ultron last week.”

Pietro ran a hand through his hair. “I’d tell you if I did. And I didn’t.”

“I know,” said Wanda. “I’m sorry, I believe you. I’m scared. After Strucker it’s us. Who knows what they’ll do to us?”

“That depends doesn’t it,” said Pietro, “on who they are.”

\--

The Hanged Man arrives in Novi Grad in the beginning of February 1984. An unnamed source has already supplied his hit’s details and schedule, broken down by days of the week. Work from nine to eight at night except on Fridays, when he came home at six exactly. Saturday, indoors. Grocery shopping on Sunday. Precise, unchanging rhythms.

The Hanged Man watches, waits and learns but there are no other nuances to be learned. The Maximoffs are apparently as simple as they look.

On the fifteenth, the Hanged Man has a fight. It happens every now and then: the Hanged Man is suddenly overcome by a crisis of conscience and will no longer be a pliant weapon. These crises usually last for days. His handlers are suddenly left scrambling to find the cause of this glitch. There should be no glitch. The Hanged Man is a memory-less, being-less, timeless creature. He exists only in the present and his life is measured out in minutes, not in years. A crisis of conscience violates these core principles of his existence: suddenly his existence has weight and he is just like them, a man whose doubts must be assuaged.

But because he is the Hanged Man, there is a fight and in the fight first one deadline passes and then the other.

\--

“I don’t think this will work,” said Wanda. “We’re nobodies.”

“He’s a rich man,” said Pietro.

Wanda rolled her eyes. “That’s not an answer.”

“They’re crazy,” said Pietro. “The rich. Look, they paint their houses rose, okay? And the Americans are even crazier.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard.”

“Besides,” said Pietro, as he began writing an invitation in his best cursive. “If we fail, we fail, but at least we tried.”

He put his pen down and looked at Wanda.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You know what I said? I can’t get inside Ultron’s head.”

“You don’t know why he’s doing this.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Wanda. “But if I could just see something - you’ve seen the cards.”

“But you picked them for them,” said Pietro. “List and Zemo - the Magician and the Tower. Someone else killed them, Wanda. Not you.”

“Mama believed in it,” she said. “Isn’t it enough? She warned papa, she said -”

“I know what she said,” Pietro snapped, sudden anger coursing through him. He regretted it almost immediately. “Sorry.”

“Every sign points to decisions to be made,” said Wanda. “Dangerous ones. Bad ones. I just want to know this isn’t the mistake we shouldn’t be making.”

\--

The Hanged Man is strapped hastily to a machine. This machine, they say, cures crises of conscience. What it feels like is obliteration and oblivion. Everything turns white as it hums and fires up.

Machines, however, are not entirely fool proof.

\--

“Strucker’s just another pawn,” drawled Ultron. “You don’t want him.”

“Is this about the big picture,” said Pietro. “I told you already, you keep your big picture and I’ll think about the hell Strucker put us through.”

“No it’s about the grand prize,” said Ultron. “The truth. You want to know the truth, right?”

“You said you’d already told us,” said Wanda. “All of it.”

Ultron waved his hand. He did that a lot, Wanda noticed. As though criticisms were all beneath him and he could do no wrong.

“But you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, don’t you?”

Pietro met her gaze for a moment. Yes. No. He nodded, slightly.

“What’s in it for you?” Wanda asked him. “What are you getting out of this?”

\--

The Hanged Man climbs the fifteen floors to the apartment where the Maximoffs live. There’s a ringing in his ears, but he doesn’t stop to think about why or ask himself why his skin buzzes like its alive. It is another fact of his existence, just like his arm which is not like his other arm but whose existence he has never questioned.

The Hanged Man kicks in the door.

\--

“The satisfaction of a job well done,” said Ultron. “I’m kidding. Like you, revenge.”

\--

And the Hanged Man finds nothing, except a bloodstained floor and a file with its papers scattered across the floor with the name Stark printed in bold across the letterhead.

\--

“I went back,” said the Hanged Man, mouth framing the words with awkward care as though it had been years since he’d talked. “I don’t know why but I did. I didn’t need to, someone else had done - and the clean-up. Something you know - stuck -”

Underneath the table, Pietro’s fingers gripped hers almost painfully. Wanda squeezed his hand back and allowed a tiny lick of red to wrap around them, warm and gentle.

 _Look at him_ , she whispered into the island with the trees. _He would have - and he’s only an attack dog._

Like us.

“Who were they?” said Wanda. “The men who strapped you in.”

The Hanged Man shrugged.

“They weren’t Soviets,” said Natasha. “That’s the joke. Our assassin came even later - after the neighbours sent theirs and found nothing.”

A hysterical bubble of a laugh nearly escaped Wanda’s throat.

“Bureaucratic incompetence, heh?” Pietro said bitterly. “And the Sokovian didn’t show.”

Natasha’s answering grin was as bitter as his. Pietro’s hand trembled in hers.

“Thank you,” said Wanda. She only half meant it. “Thank you for -”

For having a crisis of conscience. For being a man kept and treated like a rabid attack dog - and not a man. For having a mind like a colander, riddled with someone else’s bullet holes. For being a human weapon.

Wanda swallowed down the bile that rose up her throat.

“Thank you,” she said. “For telling us.”

\--

“Strucker,” Pietro told her later.

“Yes,” she said. “Strucker. HYDRA. It has to be.”

\--

“What the hell?” said Tony Stark, folding the letter addressed to him by the robot he’d created and discarded six or seven years ago.

* * *

**v. the hierophant**

“Everything ready?” Pietro asked Snowsmoke. “You know what you have to do?”

He glanced around the cafe again, at the chairs arranged in a semi-circle around an old slide projector Snowsmoke had managed to salvage from somewhere and at Snowsmoke, who was screwing the silencer into his gun.

“Yeah. Do you think it will work?” Andrej asked him. “The girl and the tramp are more trained than you are.”

“Maybe they are,” said Pietro. “But we have the element of surprise.”

\--

“I have a surprise for you,” Ultron told Wanda. “I want you to see it. Take it as a pledge of my trust.”

Wanda hesitated. “And the cafe?”

“We’ll go there afterwards,” said Ultron. “I’m sure your brother is capable of keeping them all entertained till then.”

\--

By seven, his audience was assembled and waiting: Snowsmoke and Wiola who like the two of them were orphans whom HYDRA had found and made use of, Natasha, the Hanged Man and yes, even Stark, accompanied by a man and a woman and someone who looked extraordinarily like the British agent who had been visiting the cafe for the past few weeks. He filed away this detail as something that could prove to be crucial later on that night. Like Ultron had predicted, the lure of finding an old pet belonging and the promise of a mystery had proved irresistible.

“Hey,” said Stark, in his direction. “Where’s my robot? I got an invitation from my robot and I don't see him anywhere.”

“He’ll be here soon,” said Pietro. “In the meanwhile, shall we?”

\--

Ultron led her downtown into the new section of Novi Grad: a series of concrete apartment blocks clustered together on an otherwise flattened and empty landscape. They were built in the seventies and were a matter of a pride back then, with their severe lines and futuristic shapes - cupolas, giant cylindrical tubes running down the outside for the elevators and circular windows cut into the concrete frame on each floor. Since then, they’d fallen into disrepair and were largely occupied by opportunistic squatters, until some official came along and chased them all out.

A soft oh escaped Wanda’s lips as they entered block C.

“What are we doing here?” she demanded. “Why have you brought me here?”

“You used to live here, didn’t  you?” Ultron asked her. “On the fifteenth floor, apartment D, because your father preferred to save rather than live in comfort.”

“He was a wise man,” said Wanda.

“You’ve got that from him,” said Ultron. “I like that. You can never have enough of it.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

Ultron seemed almost offended by this.

“You’re a smart girl, aren’t you?” he said. “But I’ll give you a hint: it’s the best way to begin. Back where it all started.”

\--

1984, or, the winter of shit-stirring and Sokovian nationalism. Dr Maximoff keeps his socialist convictions to himself, though he watches the news and nods approvingly at the student-protestors who call for democracy with socialist values. One does not discuss politics at work. This way, it is harder to discover that your colleague would like to see you dead or that you disagree on the material necessities of the welfare state and the current tax system. Dr Maximoff is only interested in this newly expanding field of robotics and its infinite possibilities in the realm of security.

He is part of a joint project between the Yugoslavian government and Stark Industries in liaison with the Americans. For several years, they have been working diligently and finally they are on the cusp of a discovery which Dr Maximoff fervently believes will revolutionize the world of security permanently.

At twelve, Wanda and Pietro are told his death is a consequence of American greed: the Americans want to rush a test through but Dr Maximoff believes there are glitches in the programming of these robots that could lead to fatal consequences. He’s about to blow the whistle and make it public when the Americans step in and have him quietly bumped off before he can do it - and then they go right ahead. Revenge, the twins are told, is only possible if they join the secret services where they will be given unimaginable powers that can be used on the Americans.

\--

“Except,” said Pietro, “none of that was true.”

He changed the slide.

\--

In a tower on the other side of the city, Wanda took out an old key she kept on a chain around her neck and fitted it into the lock with trembling fingers.

“Go on,” said Ultron. Something about his voice gave Wanda pause for a moment, but she stepped through.

The first thing she saw was the tarot map on the wall, with the dead crossed out in red according to her code for them. The second was the table and the gun on it. The third were the three chairs in the centre of the room, with Strucker and his twins bound and gagged in them.

“What is this?” Wanda whispered. “What are you doing?”

\--

The second version of the story places responsibility at the feet of the Soviets. Jealous that the Yugoslavians are developing tools to fight back on their own, afraid that Magda Maximoff is passing top secret information from the Soviets to her husband, they plan to eliminate the two of them and solve their problems once and for all. Perestroika or no, the secret services have no intention of handing power on a platter to their rivals, whether through sheer negligence or misapplied principle.

Enter the Black Widow. The Soviets place their faith in her, but for whatever reason she has suddenly acquired a conscience. She won’t forge the reports, she won’t give them the proof they’re so hungry for. She plays the fool, the honest man - neither of whom have a place in the world of espionage. In turn, they pressure and threaten her. Shame, disgrace and punishment. None of these seem to work on Romanoff. In the end, it is annoyance that drives her - not to lie - but to tell the truth with enough ambiguity it can be read into by whoever wants to.

She waits for her next instructions. And waits. And waits. Nothing comes. She spies on the Maximoffs through her pair of binoculars, across the gap that separates the two wings of Block C. In her own way she grows fond of them. Once, she tries warning the mother as they both examine potatoes at the local store. Magda Maximoff looks at her with large brown eyes that are filled with fear and suspicion and then nothing. The Maximoffs continue as usual and Natasha can do nothing.

On the fifteenth, she witnesses the murder: the assassin who rings the doorbell and has an altercation with Dr Maximoff, the mother hastily hiding the children in the cupboard underneath the bed, the two shots that kill the father and then the mother. She sees the government officials who come along to clean up, the man who finds the twins and the lady who takes them away. All the while, she can do nothing because her instructions are to do nothing until further instructions are given.

At seven PM, the teleprinter in her bedroom jumps to life and prints a message for her eyes only. At nine, she is on a flight back to Moscow. Mission closed.

\--

“But this is not true either,” said Pietro, looking directly at Natasha. “I too have friends in secret places.”

“Would you have trusted me?” said Natasha. “If I told you the full story?”

Pietro turned slowly away from Natasha.

“Her orders were to assassinate,” he told them. “They came that morning - she went to the consulate at seven. The janitor had to open the consulate early that morning - they sent someone to his house to pick him up, a Lada with tinted windows. They paid him in Rubles - fifty Rubles for his efforts, if he told no one. They really wanted to keep him silent. Like I said, I too have friends in secret places. She was the Soviet assassin who arrived too late to finish her job. Or so she says.”

“Congratulations,” said Natasha.

“What was it?” said Pietro. “Guilt?”

“Would you believe it if I told you that it was because I was turning over a new leaf?”

“We’ll have to see,” said Pietro.

\--

The fourth thing Wanda noticed was the mirrors placed along the walls and along the far end where the curtainless windows stood.

“Surprise,” Ultron said cheerfully.

Wanda’s fingers closed around the handle of the gun Ultron placed in her hand. A few feet away from her Strucker struggled in his bonds, eyes wide with fear.

“That’s what you wanted right?” said Ultron. “Revenge. Look - revenge.”

“I -” said Wanda, unable to move and suddenly sick to the bottom of her stomach. “I -”

“He made your life a living hell,” Ultron said excitedly. “He tortured you and your brother. Look at him, he doesn’t care what he did to you - why should you care -”

Wanda was silent. Deep inside, the angry coiled red monster she kept tucked away began to unfurl. Why, after all. Why hesitate when Strucker had lied, when Strucker had used them, when Strucker - Strucker would have liked to have them be like the Hanged Man.

“He wanted your parents dead,” Ultron continued, getting progressively more and more worked up. “So he could have a pair of twins to experiment on. He didn’t feel sorry for a moment -”

Wanda stretched out and probed Strucker’s mind. Fear rolled off him in waves. Like all bullies. And then, there like a poisonous little snake: hate. Hate and disgust -

“He’s a Nazi,” cried Ultron. “What more -”

Wanda raised the gun and fired.

\--

The Hanged Man’s version of the tale is straightforward and without artifice. This is because the Hanged Man has forgotten how to tell lies. Or precisely, has had the ability to lie forcibly stripped from him. His memory, admittedly, is patchy and faulty in places but the story by now is falling into place.

The clue to the Hanged Man lies in Strucker and List who make an appearance on the day he has his crisis of conscience. If the Hanged Man is American, there’s no reason to bring in members of the Yugoslavian secret services to help him. The Americans have everything, they don’t need help from a two bit east-European country falling apart at the seams.

The only other common thread is HYDRA. Is the Hanged Man HYDRA? It is a possibility. HYDRA has plenty of reasons for wanting Dr Maximoff out of the way, starting with the fact that if he does his job, they will no longer be able to work their way into the war-torn places of the earth and thrive in the shadow of military secrecy.

\--

“It’s an elegant solution,” said Pietro. “Blame it all on a secret society. I, however, am not convinced.”

\--

“Now let them go,” said Wanda. “They don’t have anything to do with this.”

Unlike Wanda and Pietro, the Strucker twins had been spared the weight of their father’s experiments. There was no need to experiment on them. They were perfect, after all. Perfect twins, perfect children unlike Pietro and Wanda.

“Really,” said Ultron. “D’you want to do that trick again and see?”

“I know what I’ll find,” said Wanda. “That isn’t what I mean.”

“Look harder,” said Ultron. “All the way back. Ask yourself, how did Strucker know? How did Strucker know exactly what to find?”

\--

“That’s where you come in,” said Pietro. “Mr Stark.”

“It better be good, Poirot,” said Stark. “I didn’t cancel my appointments for a dollar store pulp.”

\--

Wanda swore. “They don’t deserve this.”

“I thought you wanted revenge,” Ultron said testily. “I set everything up for you -”

“Revenge,” she said. “But they were only children when it -”

“And they already knew what they were doing,” said Ultron. “Look at them. Last of the proud Aryan race - you know it’s what’s going on inside their head -”

“You have to stop this,” said Wanda, voice raising slightly on the last word. “You have to stop this right now.”

“Let me think about it,” said Ultron. “Oh, I know. No.”

Before Wanda could stop him, Ultron took his own gun and put a bullet in the centre of both twins’ foreheads.

\--

“The problem with the secret society theory is that it falls apart on the most basic level,” said Pietro. “Yugoslavia in 1984 was hardly the centre of the world, so why choose to dabble here? And if they are the ones involved, why make such a late entrance into the story? Strucker, as far as we know, handled all the operations over here, but papa’s only point of contact with the intelligence services was Zemo and Zemo, faults aside, despised HYDRA as little more than a band of crooks and charlatans back then.”

He paused and looked around at the small group gathered. All of them except the Hanged Man were hooked now. It was possible, entirely possible, the Hanged Man already had all the answers locked up somewhere in the maze inside his head.

“And why the botched assassination orders?” Pietro continued. “No one makes such a last minute decision - not the Americans and not the Soviets. If you notice the only one which succeeded was the one run by HYDRA.”

“Okay, great story,” said Stark. “Still don’t see how it connects me to this mess.”

“Don’t you?” said Pietro. “You run one of the biggest arms dealing companies in the world. Can you imagine what would happen if suddenly, some scientist in a private-public research partnership developed a tool that would put you out of business?”

“We’d adapt,” Stark replied with a careless shrug. “It’s happened before.”

Pietro grinned triumphantly.

“No,” he said. “Not if Dr Maximoff is no longer willing to share his research or part with it to anyone.”

\--

“Fuck,” said Wanda, hand over her mouth. “What is wrong with you?”

\--

By late 1983, Dr Maximoff suspects his colleagues of being in collusion with one intelligence agency or the other. He trusts no one, so he shares none of his research with them and instead hoards it to himself. His wife is already planning their escape west, preferably to a nice crowded city where they can blend in and disappear. New York is too dangerous, America is too dangerous. If they leave now, the Americans will hunt them down until they’re gone. It’s a risk they can’t take with their two twins.

London, on the other hand, is not a bad place to start and Magda already has someone in MI6 promising them protection if they leave and turn this all over to them.

So Dr Maximoff hides as much as he can from his colleagues and with Magda’s help begins planting a trail of false research for the others to follow. He hopes this will buy them time. He hopes this will save their skins.

\--

“There’s just one problem,” says the Hanged Man, with a frown. “If no one knew how far he’d got, how the hell did they know they had to kill him?”

\--

“You said you wanted this,” Ultron snarled. “You wanted to know the truth - revenge.”

Wanda frowned. “They’re not the same thing.”

“You wanted to finish them,” said Ultron. “You said so yourself. You wanted to finish the job.”

“I never said anything about a job,” said Wanda. “That was all you.”

“Jobs, revenge, truth, Jesus,” said Ultron, coming closer. “They’re all the same thing.”

“No,” said Wanda, stepping back. “You have a job you wanted to finish. You wanted to solve this case, you were programmed for this and you failed -”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Ultron. “I’ve got it all down perfect.”

“So who is it?” said Wanda, taking another step back. “Whose turn is it now? Who dies before it stops?”

“Take a look in the mirror,” said Ultron, with an ugly laugh. “Any mirror.”

\--

Pietro frowned.

“Oh so now Poirot doesn’t actually have a solution to his murder,” said Stark. “Great.”

Pietro shut him out and focused, running over the various threads and pulling up memories at random. Mama and papa at the breakfast table with the radio in the background playing Alphaville. Wanda and he running to catch their bus for school. The two of them, heads nearly touching as they frown over math homework and mama and papa talk in low voices in the kitchen. Andreas Strucker, always tormenting one or the other of them as they wait by the lift and - _oh_ -

Wanda, snapping one day, and shouting at Andreas: “My papa is building a robot that can beat up yours.”

“Wanda,” he breathed. “ _Wanda_.”

\--

“You’re insane,” said Wanda. “I’m leaving.”

Ultron’s metal claws dug into her arms. “Look at the chain, Wanda Maximoff. You drew it yourself, subconsciously. The perfect connection. The Magician. The Devil. The Lovers and then the Queen of Swords. You always knew.”

“Let me go.”

“You talked too much,” said Ultron. “You always talk too much. Well it got your father killed. You’re proud of that, right? All that hard work of his and his ten year old kid blurts it all out to a playground bully.”

Wanda tried elbowing him. It was pointless. Struggling was pointless. Ultron was all metal, from top to bottom.

“And then the dominoes start falling,” said Ultron. “One by one.”

\--

Pietro ran.

\--

Wanda closed her eyes and waited for the coiled up thousand legged monster to come.

“The twins tell their father,” Ultron droned on. “Their father passes this on to his friend, the Doctor. The doctor passes it on to his friend in the secret service. And then it spreads like wildfire.”

Inside, the monster unfurled its wings and stretched.

“The Soviets, the Americans, the warmonger,” said Ultron. “My creator. He felt guilty so he built me, but then I started getting close to the truth and he realized the truth would cost him.”

“So he shut you down,” said Wanda. “That’s why you hate him.”

With her eyes shut she swam through the red and found it, the pulsing core that kept Ultron going.

“Yeah,” said Ultron. “Frankenstein’s monster. But I came back and now, I’m gonna finish it.”

“No,” said Wanda and flung the red out like a fisherman’s net and pulled.

\--

Wanda was slumped over on the floor, at the feet of the three dead bodies belonging to the Struckers when he arrived. Her shoulders were shaking. In her hand was what looked like a heart, but made of metal - and next to her was Ultron, just an empty metallic shell and nothing more.

“I’m here,” he whispered, taking his sister into his arms and kissing the top of her head. “I’m here.”

* * *

**vi. the wheel of fortune**

“So you knew about the glitch,” said Wanda.

“I didn’t know about _the_ glitch,” said Stark. “I knew there was something wrong with him, right before he went all HAL 9000 on everyone. So I shut him down.”

“Not well enough.”

“Not well enough,” Stark agreed. “Look - I’m sorry about - you know - everything. You seem like good kids. Anything I can do -”

“No,” said Wanda quickly. “Thank you, but no.”

“You know,” said Natasha. “The offer still stands. Now that they’ll probably want your blood, for having us around.”

Wanda smiled and looped her arm through Pietro’s on one side and Snowsmoke’s on the other.

“Thanks but no thanks,” said Wanda.

“We like the excitement,” said Pietro.

"They do," said Snowsmoke. "Not me."

* * *

On the sixteenth of February 1998, the Cafe Sparrowhawk opened at exactly ten precisely as usual and its usual customers from the nearby embassies poured in.

At her table, now inside by the window because of the snow collected on the sidewalk outside, Wanda Maximoff turned the page of her book and continued reading.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The letter at the beginning is more or less taken from the opening passages of Agatha Christie's A Murder Is Announced.


End file.
